Web-Hosted Software: Compliance as a Service

Inc. Technology.

Web-hosted software can keep you in line with ever-changing regulations.

Who's best able to make sure your company stays up to date and compliant in the face of ever changing regulations and standards? For a growing number of companies, the answer is a software-as-a-service provider. A recent Gartner study found 15 to 20 percent of responding companies, both large and small, use web-hosted software to track compliance. And more companies are using Web-hosted software to oversee compliance every year, Gartner found.

What's the attraction? As with all software-as-a-service (SaaS), it allows the company to avoid using IT staff to oversee a non-core function. "Using software to manage compliance reporting becomes too big a burden for a small organization with limited resources," explains Dariel LeBoeuf,senior vice president of communications and education services at TraceSecurity, a SaaS provider that helps companies with governance, risk management and compliance (GRC). "They tell us they don't have the staff to keep up with the regulations," he says....Read More

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Using SaaS to Save on IT Spending

Small businesses are moving toward SaaS, says Ray Boggs, an analyst at IDC, the technology market researcher. “It’s a very real minority,” Boggs says. Historically, hardware accounted for a bigger chunk of small companies’ IT spending, but over time that’s switching to software and services, and SaaS is playing into that, Boggs says. Small business owners that Bogg surveyed for a March 2008 IDC report on SaaS aren’t particularly keen on moving applications “into the cloud,” but they are interested in having business functions handled remotely, he says. “It’s almost like a different person was answering the survey,” he says.

At Speakeasy, Hyde knows a thing or two about on-demand software. Previously, he was part of the management team that founded Salesforce.com, the pioneering SaaS provider. At Speakeasy, Hyde was instrumental in a decision earlier this year to replace the spreadsheets that the 330-person company used to calculate sales commissions with Web-based software from Xactly, a SaaS-only sales incentive management software vendor. The decision was a no-brainer. The IT staff at Speakeasy, was too busy working on higher-priority projects to build something from scratch, so commercial software was the only way to go. And software-as-a-service was the cheapest option, Hyde says...Read More